Quotes from Robert Bly

The sound of the rampaging Missouri,Bending the reeds again and again—something inside usLike a ghost train in the RockiesAbout to be buried in snow!Its long hootMaking the owl in the Douglas fir turn his head.

We spend our life until we're twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

My life failed on the very day I was born.

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.

We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, I want to tie the two arms together, And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.

One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.

... where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be.

There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.

If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it; the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.

The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.